Booking tickets on IRCTC is becoming a legend now – Infact phrases like “_____ is like booking a Tatkal ticket on IRCTC” . Anything that is extremely tough or next to impossible is in most cases equated to booking IRCTC tickets.

Do you want some examples? Here they are…

“Booking a Tatkal rail ticket (at 8 AM @ irctc.co.in) is like going to war.” – read on a blog.

— Chaitanya Purandare (@iChaitanya) May 29, 2011

…raising funds for your startup is like booking a Tatkal ticket on IRCTC.

While, availability of tickets is one factor, the issue is usually associated with bottleneck on IRCTC servers during peak hours.

But it may all change now!

Railway Minister Sadanand Gowda will be launching new revamped IRCTC next generation e-ticketing system today (13 August). The new system has been running in pilot mode on nget.irctc.co.in for quite sometime now and some of you may have already experienced it. However, going forward, it will be available to all on the main IRCTC website.

Around a year back CRIS started working on IRCTC upgrade project that cost an estimated 180 crore and it is now live. The new upgraded platform will will a capacity of booking 7200 tickets per minute. Previously, this capacity was limited to 2000 tickets. People who have used the new platform have given positive feedback. The IRCTC website now feels much more snappier and faster.

While the back-end capacity server has been improved, the look and feel of the website still remains ancient. Scrolling vertical and horizontal texts, animated banners are still strewn across the homepage. It is beyond me as to why IRCTC has not revamped the look & feel. With over 100 crores at their disposal, they could have easily redesigned the entire site for a better user experience!

Currently, around 4.5 lakh e-tickets are booked on an average day, which can go upto 5.5 – 6 lakh during peak seasons. IRCTC now has daily transactions of more than Rs. 53 crore as against Rs. 37 crore in 2013.

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin and Facebook.Arun’s Google+ Profile

[…] year, IRCTC upgraded their system, and enabled booking of 7,200 tickets per minute. On an average, around 5-7 lakh tickets are booked per day on IRCTC website, and 1 crore+ users […]

sabhya sachi seal says 4 years ago

Till , I am not satisfied…..to use irctc website….mostly at tatkal bookin time……all the time it show..error massege…at the time of booking…………plz….take proper step to improve the whole e ticket system…

[…] It is great to see IRCTC taking steps to ensure that it becomes easy for train travelers to book tickets. Last year they overhauled their entire infrastructure and increased their capacity of booking tickets from 2000 tickets to 7200 tickets a minute. […]

Aha… now thats is a interesting feedback. I have heard positive feedback about the platform. I found it snappier than what it was previously when I used it. But yes, I did not go through the entire process of booking the tickets, so I cant say for sure how good new system is..

But it is a shame if after spending 180 crore to revamp the system, it still does not work properly!

Horrible website and waste of money.. So I live in the US now and visinting India next moenth.. I literally jumped when I read the news that the website is now overhauled.. So I visit the website and could not remember my username. So I wanted to do a password reset. Horribly slow… So after sometime, I got the page and entered my user id and found that its deactivated. So I tried looking for a link to reset my userid and I could find none… Now, I was pretty adamant about testing the website and so tried registering for a new user id but when I clicked on submit, I get an error that my email id is associated with my old user id which is already deactivated with no way to reset the password… So, in short, I am in a deadlock… Anyways, looked for a feedback link and found none… Welcome to IRCTC :) :)